Adam Mars-Jones writes:

T he​ title of Fernanda Melchor’s unrelenting novel brings together disruption and regularity, a break in the pattern but also the pattern that underlies the break. Early in the novel reference is made to a particularly apocalyptic hurricane that results in a disastrous landslide and an avalanche of mud. We’re told the event took place in 1978, but for the impoverished Mexicans whose lives Melchor describes the erosion is slow and uninterrupted, and has a timeless and existential quality. The emotional landscape of the book, its mutually reinforcing cruelty and neglect, isn’t a long way from Buñuel’s Mexican-set film Los Olvidados (1950), and aims for a similar response of bleak pity.

(LRB 07 Mar 2020)